The R&B singer claims to have signed bad contracts and made bad financial deals.

The R&B singer claims to have signed bad contracts and made bad financial deals.

R. Kelly will appear in a Chicago courtroom on Monday to answer to charges of rape, and, per reports, will almost certainly return to jail afterward. According to CNN, the R&B singer says he’s broke and can’t afford the $100,000 he needs to be released.

Kelly (real name: Robert Sylvester Kelly) spent the weekend in jail, after having been indicted by Chicago police on 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse against four victims, three of whom were underage at the time of the alleged crimes. At the time, his bond was set at $10 million; in Illinois, he must put up 10 percent of that in order to be released.

However, despite being one of the most successful R&B recording artists of all-time, Kelly is having a hard time coming up with that kind of money. As The Chicago Tribune reports, his attorney, Steve Greenberg, told The Associated Press over the weekend that arranging the singer’s bond money is “complicated,” although he also added that Greenberg was confident his client would be released “Monday or Tuesday.”

Kelly’s finances, however, paint a different picture.

Unpaid debts

The singer is tens of thousands of dollars in arrears in child support. According to court documents, he currently owes $169,000 to his ex-wife, after having been ordered in 2009 to pay $20,833 per month. He faces another criminal hearing on March 6 if he hasn’t paid $161,663 of the child support money he owes, although Greenberg notes that the child support and the bond money are two separate issues and that Kelly doesn’t have to pay up on child support in order to be freed from jail, assuming he comes up with his bond money, that is.

He’s also reportedly behind on rent on his Chicago studio, owing an amount that almost exactly mirrors the amount of child support that he owes: $166,000. Though eviction proceedings have been going on for months, reports suggest Kelly was at his Chicago studio “minutes” before turning himself in.

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What’s more, he’s allegedly behind on rent on two suburban Atlanta rental properties, to the tune of $31,000.

How can one of the most successful R&B performers of all time be broke?

Greenberg says that his client has been done in by “hangers-on,” “mismanagement,” and “bad deals,” and that at this point in his career, he “really doesn’t have any money.”

Meanwhile, Greenberg says his client remains in good spirits, according to ET Online, as he stays in a private room in the Cook County Jail’s hospital wing. He’s not there because he’s sick or suicidal, his lawyer says, but rather because keeping high-profile, celebrity inmates away from General Population is standard procedure in most jails and prisons.